Re: Ready for translation: Tech News #31 (2019)

Hello,

Le 25/07/2019 à 23:01, Nick Wilson (Quiddity) a écrit :
> The latest tech newsletter is ready for early translation:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/2019/31>
> Let us know if you have any questions, comments or concerns. As
> always, we appreciate your help and feedback.
I’ve got a question concerning that message in the Problems category:
‘Wikidata will be in read-only mode on 30 July from 05:00 to 05:30 UTC
because of a server switch.’

For a few weeks, I’ve been disturbed by those messages about the
Wikimedia services being in read-only mode because of a server switch, a
hardware problem being fixed, a database being moved, etc.

This started with Tech/News/2019/23. There I saw the message for
Wikimedia Commons. First, I wanted to reuse a previous translation of
that kind of message, to try to minimize the effort needed to deal with
these recurrent facts, especially for readers (who are like my
customers). But there was no suggestion, so I searched for a previous
occurrence of this message in previous newsletters. I guess you’ve
noticed my HTTP requests in this process; I used the following Bash
commands:
for i in `seq 1 21`; do curl
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/2019/$i 2>/dev/null | grep
"You will be able to read" && echo $i; done
for i in `seq 1 53`; do curl
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/2018/$i 2>/dev/null | grep
"You will be able to read" && echo $i; done

(Then, in Tech/News/2019/24, I understood that I should provide a more
identifiable User-Agent for such requests.)

But this returned no previous occurrence! So I thought ‘Well, never
mind, let’s write a new translation, and from now on I’ll care about it.’

The same message appeared in Tech/News/2019/25, but initially I didn’t
do the translation myself.

Then there were new read-only times, especially in #27, #28 and #30. In
these newsletters, the message was put in the ‘Changes later this week’
(#27 and #30) or ‘Future changes’ (#28) category. I didn’t notice it in
#27, but in #28 this came with the fact that the message was written
differently, in spite of Benoît Evellin’s kind message from June 3rd
saying that you ‘are looking for solutions to avoid repetitive
translations’ (i.e. avoid throwing different message formats for the
very same meaning, I guess). Then I noticed the category change and
wanted to move the message to ‘Problems’, but then I noticed that the
announced date was actually quite far so ‘well, never mind, but let’s
provide a longer translation to emphasize the oddity of the far date and
the changed category’ (and it says: ‘Please be told that there will be a
server switch in 3 weeks; meanwhile, there’ll be a block.’).

Then in #30 I noticed the category and the new message format. In
opposition to previous formats, this one does not say that the read-only
mode is clearly due to the described maintenance process, so I had to
provide a new translation to mimic this: the read-only mode somewhat has
to do with the process, but we don’t know how.

This leads me to talk about the semantical difficulty of previous
formats. It says that ‘Such service will be in read-only mode, /because
of/ anything’ or ‘/This is to/ do anything’. This is problematic to me
because, in principle, maintenance processes do not impose blocking the
services. So I understand that it’s WMF maintenance processes which have
this flaw. In other words, the blocks are not due to the need for
maintenance itself but it’s due to the imperfect processes, and it might
theoretically be possible to have maintenance processes which do not
impose to block the services.

Moreover, from my experience, when you’ve got database servers, you
don’t have to replace a server with another one. You’ll more likely
setup several servers to store the data. Then one server will crash, so
you will remove this one, and add another one instead. The data can be
automatically transferred to and exchanged with the new server, and
there’s no need to block the service. So software already exists to deal
with this (in my case, it was FreeNAS), and each time I am pretty
surprised that the so important Wikimedia Foundation hasn’t taken
advantage of this software and still gives messages about the need to
block for maintenance. Actually this fact didn’t bother me in itself;
that’s more the linguistic constructions and meanings that I’m caring
about as a translator.

You might notice that my translations do not contain this semantical
problem, because I don’t want to enter or forward apophenia. I say that
blocking ‘is due to fixing’, ‘comes with a server switch’ or ‘is in the
process of a server switch’, so it’s part of the process but is not
essentially linked to the need of maintenance.

So now, in #31, that message from #28 has come back to the ‘Problems’
category. All this is weird, you know! Seeing these ‘problems’ becoming
once ‘future changes’ and being expressed using many different wordings
with some being wrong… Therefore I can’t help thinking: ‘But what the
fuck are they doing with this semantically problematic message?’

I’m not trying to accuse you or to become the new whistleblower. But
when I work, I feel responsible for the fact that my work actually emits
and supports right things. It’s known that bosses can lead their
employees to do bad things, without the employees being knowing at
first, and if they don’t care soon enough, then it might be too late for
them to fix it themselves. Therefore when I see something sleazy in the
scope of my work, I have to ask about it. Initially it was only a quite
rare, constantly reworded and semantically incorrect message for that
problem in the week; but it suddenly became a message appearing more
than one week out of two, possibly for the thing coming in several
weeks, and in various categories of the newsletter. So, tell me! What’s
the point? Is there something so particular with this recurrent problem?
Why is this so hard?

Please note that I have many things to do other than my volunteer work
for Wikimedia, and that dealing with such oddities takes much time and
energy. It’s nearly several hours that I spent viewing and thinking:
‘Oh, that’s weird,’ then ‘Oh, fuck, that’s weird again,’ and finally
‘Oh, fuck, fuck, that’s really weird!!’ But being sure that my work is
not used for a devious scheme is more important than anything else. So
if the WMF staff could be coherent without me having to explicitly tell
them that they must be coherent, it would be much, much better for me.

Re: Ready for translation: Tech News #31 (2019)

I’ve got a question concerning that message in the Problems category:
‘Wikidata will be in read-only mode on 30 July from 05:00 to 05:30 UTC
because of a server switch.’

[...]

First, I wanted to reuse a previous translation of
that kind of message, to try to minimize the effort needed to deal with
these recurrent facts, especially for readers (who are like my
customers). But there was no suggestion,

Thanks for the bug report. I
do not know why a translation suggestion did not appear. I copied the
exact wikitext from the previous mention of this item 3 weeks ago, in
order to try to help the translators. Possibly part of an existing bug? Please add any details that you can, into phabricator.